From https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/:
"Unfortunately the reality of LLM-based contributions has been mostly negative for us, from an increase in background noise due to worthless drive-by PRs full of hallucinations (that wouldn’t even compile, let alone pass CI), to insane 10 thousand line long first time PRs. In-between we also received plenty of PRs that looked fine on the surface, some of which explicitly claimed to not have made use of LLMs, but where follow-up discussions immediately made it clear that the author was sneakily consulting an LLM and regurgitating its mistake-filled replies to us."
Pretty much sums up the LLM fanbase.
I don't think it's the complete fanbase. However, there are lots of people in the world who live their whole life by vibing. It's a viable way to live and sometimes it's the only way to live. But they have a very loose relationship with truth and reason. Programming was a domain that filtered out those people because they found it hard to succeed at it. LLM's have changed that and it's a huge problem. It's hard to know if LLMs will end up being a net win for the industry. They may speed up the good programmers a little, but those people were able to program anyway without LLMs. They will speed up the bad programmers a lot and that's where the balance sheet goes into the red.
> However, there are lots of people in the world who live their whole life by vibing
Why are they often so desperate to lie and non-consensually harass others with their vibing rather than be honest about it? Why do they think they are "helping" with hallucinated rubbish that can't even build?
I use LLMs. It is not difficult to: ethically disclose your use, double check all of your work, ensure things compile without errors, not lie to others, not ask it to generate ten paragraphs of rubbish when the answer is one sentence, and respect the project's guidelines. But for so many people this seems like an impossible task.
> Why do they think they are "helping" with hallucinated rubbish that can't even build?
Because they can't tell the difference between what the machine is outputting, and what people have built. All they see is the superficial resemblance (long lines of incomprehensbile code) and the reward that the people writing the code have got, and want that reward too.
the target audience of the cyber typer terminal [0]
"Main character energy". What they're really doing is protecting their view of themselves as smart, and they're making a contribution for the sake of trying to perform being an OSS dev rather than out of need or altruism.
AI is absolutely terrible for people like that, as it's the perfect enabler.
You're asking why oil doesn't act like water. It's not really an impossible task, it's just not one they agree with.
It's the same as cheating in a game. You are given an """advantage""", so lying about it seems like the best option
LLMs are in this case enabling bad behavior, but open source software has always been vulnerable to this. Similarly, people who use LLMs to do this kind of thing are the kind of people who would have done it without LLMs but for the large effort it would have taken. We're just learning now how large that group is.
This is a good thing, it's an opportunity to make open source development processes robust to this kind of sabotage.
> It's hard to know if LLMs will end up being a net win for the industry.
True, regardless of that, for sure with LLM we are borrowing Technical debt like never before.
> It's hard to know if LLMs will end up being a net win for the industry. They may speed up the good programmers a little, but those people were able to program anyway without LLMs. They will speed up the bad programmers a lot and that's where the balance sheet goes into the red.
If you will forgive an appeal to authority:
The hard thing about building software is deciding what one wants to say, not saying it. No facilitation of expression can give more than marginal gains.
- Fred Brooks, 1986
> there are lots of people in the world who live their whole life by vibing. It's a viable way to live and sometimes it's the only way to live. But they have a very loose relationship with truth and reason
This response 1000% was crafted with input from an LLM, or the user spends too much time reading output from llms.
I have never used an LLM to write. Writing forces me to think (and I edited the comment a couple of times when writing it which helped me clear up my thinking). "It's a viable way to live and sometimes it's the only way to live" is a personal realization that has taken me some time to understand. You can go back through my comment history to the time before LLMs to check if my style was different then.
If you run your writing through an LLM, it can poke holes in your argument, organize your ideas better, or point out that your tone is hostile/dismissive. It doesn’t need to be a replacement for writing or thinking, especially if you’re learning along the way.
I don't get that impression at all. LLMs would have avoided the stylistic repetition of "live". Asking an LLM to reformulate the sentences you quoted yields this slop:
> There are a lot of people who go through life by vibing. And honestly: that’s not automatically “bad.” Sometimes it’s even the only workable way to get through things. The issue is that “vibe-first” people tend to have a pretty loose relationship with truth, rigor, and being pinned down by specifics. They’ll confidently move forward on what sounds right instead of what they can verify.
I'll finish this post with a sentence containing an em-dash -- just to confuse people -- and by remarking on how sad I find it that people latch onto dashes and complete sentences as the signifiers of LLM use, instead of the inconsistent logic and general sloppiness that's the actual problem.
Fanbase, maybe. Software engineers using these projects? Probably forking and updating themselves.
FWIW, I've opened a half dozen PRs from LLMs and had them approved. I have some prompts I use to make them very difficult to tell they are AI.
However if it is a big anti-llm project I just fork and have agents rebase my changes.
I'm firmly in the LLM fanbase. Not because I can't type code (was doing it for over 17 years, everywhere from low level hardware drivers in C to web frontend to robot development at home as a hobby - coding is fun!), but because in my profession it allows me to focus more on the abstraction layer where "it matters".
I'm not saying that I'm no longer dealing with code at all though. The way I work is interactively with the LLM and pretty much tell it exactly what to do and how to do it. Sometimes all the way down to "don't copy the reference like that, grab a deep copy of the object instead". Just like with any other type of programming, the only way to achieve valuable and correct results is by knowing exactly what you want and express that exactly and without ambiguity.
But I no longer need to remember most of the syntax for the language I happen to work with at the moment, and can instead spend time thinking about the high level architecture. To make sure each involved component does one thing and one thing well, with its complexities hidden behind clear interfaces.
Engineers who refuse to, or can't, or won't utilize the benefits that LLMs bring will be left behind. It's just the way it is. I'm already seeing it happening.
This mindset is fine (it's mine essentially too).
But it absolutely has to be combined with verification/testing at the same speed as code production.
I generally do have that mindset, but over the past 1y of Claude code I do notice that I’m clearly losing my understanding of the internals of projects. I do review LLM generated code, understand it, no problem reading/following through. But then someone asks me a question, and I’m like… wait, I actually don’t know. I remember the instructions I gave and reviewing the code but don’t actually have a fine-details model of the actual implementation crystallized in my mind, I need to check, was that thing implemented the way I thought it was or not? Wait, it’s actually wrong/not matching at all what I thought! It’s definitely becoming uncomfortable and makes me reconsider my use of Claude code pretty significantly
> Engineers who refuse to, or can't, or won't utilize the benefits that LLMs bring will be left behind. It's just the way it is. I'm already seeing it happening.
Any examples how you see some engineers being left behind?
- [deleted]
Not really - I imagine as with almost everything in life there's a normal distribution, in this case of the quality with which people use AI tools.
Fake it ‘till you make it. Seems like LLM’s have caught-on to that too.
You can curb an LLM into doing what you want. Unfortunately people don't have the patience or the skill.
People who have skill can do the same without LLMs, maybe slightly slower on average but on more predictable schedule.
I wouldn’t say slightly slower; LLMs are massively useful for software engineering in the right hands.
For some personal projects I still stick to the basics and write everything by hand though. It’s kinda nice and grounding; and almost feels like a detox.
For any new software engineer, I’m a strong advocate of zero LLM use (except maybe as a stack overflow alternative) for your first few months.